She acknowledged the home and the relationship still, and Harold's face flushed with a look of pleasure, which deepened in intensity when Arthur, with a wave of the hand habitual to him, said:
"I must keep her now that you are here to see to the grandmother, but will let you have her to-night. Come up later, if you like, and walk home with her."
"I shall be most happy to do so," Harold said, and then the carriage drove away, while he went in to his grandmother, who had not attended the funeral, but who knew that he had returned, and was waiting for him.
CHAPTER LI.
UNDER THE PINES WITH HAROLD.
IT seemed to Harold that it had been a thousand years since he left Shannondale, so much had come into and so much had gone out of his life since he said good-by to the girl he loved and to the girl who loved him. One was dead, and he had only come in time to help lay her in her grave; while the other, was, some might think, farther removed from him than death itself could have removed her.
But Harold did not feel so. He had faith in Jerrie—that she would not change, and when he read the Judge's letter in the privacy of his room at the Tacoma, he rejoiced with an exceeding great joy that her home and birthright had been so strangely restored. He never doubted the story for a moment, but felt rather as if he had known it always, and wondered how any one could have imagined for a moment that blue-eyed, golden-haired Jerrie was the child of the dark, coarse looking woman found dead beside her. "I am so glad for Jerrie," he said, without a thought that her relations to himself would in any way be changed.
Once when she had told him of the fancies which haunted her so often, he had put them from him with a fear that, were they true, Jerrie would be lost to him forever. But he had no such misgivings now; and when Jerrie's letter came, urging his return, both for her own sake and Maude's, he wrote a few hurried lines telling her how glad he was for her, and of his intention to start for the East as soon as possible. "To-morrow, perhaps," he wrote, "in which case I may be there before this letter reaches you, for the mails are sometimes slow, and the Judge's communication was overdue three or four days."
Starting the second day after his letter, Harold traveled day and night, while something seemed beckoning him on; and when, between St. Paul and Chicago, there came a detention from a freight car off the track, he felt that he must fly, so sure was he that he was wanted and anxiously looked for at Tracy Park, where at that very time Maude was dying. The next afternoon he left Chicago, and with no further accident reached Shannondale just as the long procession was winding its way to the cemetery.